Fascist (insult)

Common card · No. 282432

The word fascist has been used as a pejorative or insult against a wide range of people, political movements, governments, and institutions since the emergence of fascism in Europe in the 1920s. Political commentators on both the left and the right accused their opponents of being fascists, starting in the years before World War II. In 1928, the Communist International labeled their social democratic opponents as social fascists, while the social democrats themselves as well as some parties on the political right accused the Communists of having become fascist under Joseph Stalin's leadership. In light of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, The New York Times declared on 18 September 1939 that, "Hitlerism is brown communism, Stalinism is red fascism." Later, in 1944, the socialist and anti-fascist writer George Orwell commented that fascism had been rendered almost meaningless by its common use as an insult against various people, and argued that in England the word fascist had become a synonym...

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